Fay­ola KJ Fras­er

Kalain Ho­sein is a cli­mate, weath­er, and en­vi­ron­men­tal jour­nal­ist with many years of ex­pe­ri­ence as the lead Weath­er An­chor at Guardian Me­dia Lim­it­ed. For Ho­sein, his work in the me­dia is the ul­ti­mate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of his merged love for the en­vi­ron­ment and me­te­o­rol­o­gy. From a young age, Ho­sein was very in­ter­est­ed in the en­vi­ron­ment. He knew af­ter mov­ing to the Unit­ed States with his fam­i­ly in 2010, that his in­ter­ests al­so ex­tend­ed to weath­er and cli­mate. Re­mem­ber­ing key weath­er pat­terns from when he was on­ly nine years old, Ho­sein vivid­ly de­scribed watch­ing the ef­fect of the In­di­an Ocean Tsuna­mi and Hur­ri­cane Ka­t­ri­na in 2004 and 2005.

Fun­ni­ly enough, when he pro­posed his de­sire to study me­te­o­rol­o­gy at uni­ver­si­ty, his par­ents ques­tioned why. “What are you plan­ning to do with that de­gree?” they asked, “Come back and read the weath­er?” Ho­sein said that they were not com­plete­ly off tar­get, and al­though as the weath­er an­chor that is a pri­ma­ry re­spon­si­bil­i­ty, his ed­u­ca­tion and ex­pe­ri­ence are rich and di­verse, and he al­ready has an im­pres­sive re­sume at a young age.

At the ter­tiary lev­el, Ho­sein stud­ied geo­physics, which per­fect­ly po­si­tioned him to have a ca­reer in the oil and gas sec­tor up­on re­turn­ing to Trinidad. Much to his sur­prise, up­end­ing his care­ful­ly laid plans, when he re­turned to Trinidad in 2018 af­ter com­plet­ing his de­gree, the clo­sure of Petrotrin meant that the job mar­ket was flood­ed with geo­physi­cists. Com­bin­ing his pas­sion for me­te­o­rol­o­gy and the en­vi­ron­ment, he launched “T&T’s Weath­er Cen­tre’’ which be­came his out­let to re­port on the weath­er and cli­mate. One ex­cit­ing morn­ing, Ho­sein re­ceived a call from Ria Ram­bal­ly, invit­ing him to in­ter­view for the weath­er an­chor po­si­tion at CNC3. At first, he turned it down, out of con­cern for mak­ing him­self a pub­lic fig­ure, but af­ter a 24-hour win­dow had passed he ac­cept­ed the job.

Af­ter a month of cam­era and voice train­ing and get­ting an un­der­stand­ing of the news­room, Ho­sein was put on cam­era, and since then he has nev­er left. His col­leagues from uni­ver­si­ty who did the same geo­physics de­gree have all done var­i­ous things, but none as rad­i­cal a de­par­ture from the field as him. He de­scribed an­chor­ing as a “mas­sive ad­just­ment from be­ing a pri­vate cit­i­zen for 22 years”, to be­ing recog­nised wher­ev­er he goes. An up­side to his job is that when peo­ple do recog­nise him, he has the ex­pert tools avail­able to him as the weath­er is one of the most of­ten used top­ics for “small talk”.

Ho­sein con­sid­ers him­self a pro­fes­sion­al small talk­er, sim­ply put, “be­cause I just love talk­ing about the weath­er”.

Re­flect­ing on the very sober­ing re­al­i­ties of cli­mate change, Ho­sein of­fers lis­ten­ers a rue­ful ac­count of the im­pact of the warm­ing of the cli­mate. Not on­ly does he read the news, but he goes in­to the field to do sto­ries. Most re­cent­ly, he was sent to cov­er the Wood­land salt wa­ter in­tru­sion and was able to speak to farm­ers and hear about the re­al-life im­pacts of a warmer world on hu­man and an­i­mal en­vi­ron­ments. De­scrib­ing the im­pacts as painful, wit­ness­ing the hu­man de­struc­tion of our en­vi­ron­ment is dif­fi­cult for him to cope with. He of­fers a glim­mer of hope, how­ev­er, as he says that “hu­man­i­ty is re­silient”, and with con­cert­ed in­ter­na­tion­al ac­tion, we can slow down the im­pact and “fight above”.

Af­ter liv­ing in the US for eight years and at­tend­ing a British In­ter­na­tion­al School in Hous­ton, Ho­sein came back to T&T. He loves the rush of the news­room, and de­scribes that “every sin­gle day is dif­fer­ent”. Ho­sein still gets ex­cit­ed to go in the field every day, ex­plore his coun­try and in­ter­act with the pub­lic. His role has al­so tak­en him to var­i­ous in­ter­na­tion­al con­fer­ences rel­e­vant to the en­vi­ron­ment. “I feel in­cred­i­bly for­tu­nate,” he says, “es­pe­cial­ly as I have been able to merge my love for the en­vi­ron­ment with me­te­o­rol­o­gy”.

As a young man in the spot­light, Ho­sein hopes to be a cen­tral play­er in change-mak­ing at the pol­i­cy lev­el when it comes to en­vi­ron­men­tal mat­ters. He has al­ready re­ceived many ac­co­lades and awards for his work in the cli­mate space, such as the Broad­cast­ing Union’s Caribbean Me­dia Awards re­lat­ed to his cov­er­age of COP 27, and has al­so re­ceived awards for his me­dia work, such as the Youth in Me­dia Award in 2023. For Ho­sein, the work is not near­ly fin­ished, as he in­tends to con­tin­ue to use this plat­form for in­for­ma­tion­al pur­pos­es and as a lever­age point to achieve re­al change.